GAME ON by Helle Mardahl Studio – Photography by Alastair Wiper, ©Helle Mardahl Studio.
Design. Helle Mardahl Studio brought an unexpected guest to 3daysofdesign 2026: the spirit of digital play. GAME ON was the Danish designer’s invitation to reconsider what craftsmanship can do when it borrows the logic of gaming. “By translating digital forms into handcrafted glass, I wanted to create a space that feels childish and fun, yet still exclusive — a place where people can rediscover curiosity and joy,” Mardahl told Archipanic.
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Entry came through a bright yellow door at the studio’s boutique in the heart of Copenhagen — already a signal that the usual rules were suspended. Beyond it, Mardahl’s Bon Bon pendant lamps descended in cascading pastel clusters, appearing to stack, interlock, and ricochet mid-air, as though the ceiling itself had become a playing field.
The chromatic palette of GAME ON reads like a confectioner’s inventory: Milky Rose, Champagne, Blueberry Ice Cream, Banana. Each mouth-blown piece functioned as a single move within a far larger composition, while mirrored surfaces sent colour and form bouncing across the space in shifting, kaleidoscopic sequences.
Shelves throughout the boutique held vessels, sculptures, and vases that extended the installation’s candy-shop atmosphere into something more intimate and browsable — tactile punctuation to an otherwise immersive visual experience.
What GAME ON ultimately proposed was a rethinking of sculptural glass through the language of play — geometry recast as game piece, light as score. Mardahl’s exploration of “craftsmanship, imagination and the emotional power of design” found here a fitting arena: one where mouth-blown glass and gaming logic collide, and the result is anything but child’s play.
Operating at the intersection of art and functionality, Helle Mardahl Studio has built a universe that feels lifted from the pages of a storybook. Glossy, tactile, and unapologetically dreamy, Mardahl’s glass collections draw on the same sources that have fired imaginations for generations — childhood memories, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — and distil them into objects that sit somewhere between collectible and keepsake.
All photos are by Alastair Wiper, ©Helle Mardahl Studio.
